1957年出生于杭州。中国美术学院版画系学士、史论系博士，深圳画院研究员。　　
　　就学于中国美术学院，它的前身便是西湖国立艺术院。这是一个在当时非常前卫、但又颇具文人气质的学院。严善錞深受黄宾虹、潘天寿的学术观念影响，对他们再三致意的文人画，做过系统的研究，并发表了富有建设性专著。同时，作为一个版画专业的学生，他又经历了西方造型技术的严格训练。在林风眠、关良的艺术风格中，他领悟到了中西绘画的变通之处。坚实的造型基础和全面的艺术修养，使他走上了一条与当代中国艺术家不同的创作道路。
　　严善錞一直以故乡西湖作为自己的创作主题。他近十年来创作的铜版画，以自己特有的材料和技术手法，真切地表现了他自己对西湖气质的感受：清峻、遥深、温润、古雅。不仅丰富了西湖给人的视觉经验，也拓展了铜版画的表现域。他的综合材料绘画，采取的是类似于欧洲的湿壁画的和中国的古代壁画的材料和手法，它们既有油画的厚实感，又有水墨画的空灵感，所有景物都像是从画面的背后映现出来，给人以耐久的遐想。

　　Yan Shanchun was born in Hanzhou, China. Among the first of a generation of artists who emerged from the academies when they were reopened after being closed during the Cultural Revolution, Yan Shanchun graduated from Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Art) in 1982, specializing in printmaking. He was trained in traditional Chinese calligraphy and influenced by American abstract painting. Although Yan is fully cognizant of the long history of abstract painting in the West, he has been less concerned with rivaling these antecedents than in modifying their example to enrich the valued tradition of Chinese literati who cultivated the arts of calligraphy, painting and poetry in seclusion. That privileged life-style is no longer possible but in his detachment from the goal-oriented atmosphere of the contemporary art world and in the development of his own quiet poetic sensibility equally attuned to poetry and the visual arts, he may be considered a twenty-first century equivalent of these legendary polymaths.